Speakers
Description
In the past decade, the booming of new space economy led to the urgent need for Europe to increase the competitiveness and resilience of the European space transportation services on the worldwide market. In this context, ESA has initiated the elaboration of a technical vision for the future of space transportation in Europe: Vision 2030+. Climate change is one of the most pressing issue humanity has to address and it is taken into account in Vision 2030+ with the backbone value “environmental sustainability”.
ArianeGroup is part of this vision through its project “Visionary Offer for an European family of LAuncher base on common building block and REusability” (VOLARE), in collaboration with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, to jointly conduct the environmental study. The VOLARE feasibility study aims to consolidate a future European family of reusable launch systems encompassing human space transportation capability, and the associated set of common building blocks preparing this future family. An eco-design approach using a screening Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method was performed to propose solutions, which minimize the environmental impacts.
Two families of launchers are compared, they differ mainly by the choice of propellant: a full methane family and a hybrid family with methane and hydrogen. In each family, four classes of launchers are proposed from the Small to the Super Heavy launcher. These families were built assuming that common building blocks are possible despite the large range of performances that they target. The launchers are fully reusable with the exception of the Super Heavy launcher, which is semi-reusable.
Two analysis tools were used to perform the environmental assessment: the first one is the SimaPro software, and the second one is the Assessment and Comparison Tool (ACT), developed by EPFL. The tools have similarities in most aspects enabling an LCA study, and complement each other in specific areas.
Following the LCA standard iteratively, the first step in the environmental analysis was to define the functional unit, the scope of the study, the assumptions, and the impact indicators. Only the choice of some impact indicators differs between the two tools. The second step focused on modelling the systems, collecting data and information to create their inventories and assessing their expected impacts. The third step was the analysis and interpretation of the results. The latter included a projection on the future in terms of consumption and production of propellants, in order to determine which technological solution was the least impactful.
The presentation at the CleanSpace Industry Days 2024 will include a description of the design process, how screening LCA was used to integrate environmental considerations in the VOLARE projects, a summary of the main results and expected environmental hotspots at system level, and recommendations to improve and facilitate these kind of early-stage studies.
